FOREWORD

Boston received bad national publicity early in the early twenty-first century when violence broke out in the town between locals and immigrant workers. Boston had been thought of as a quiet country town, but it has a dramatic history and violence has broken out on other occasions in the past. Several times the growth of Boston has been sustained by immigration as people are attracted by the prospect of wealth and success.

There have been many ups and downs in Boston’s history, with highs in the medieval and Georgian periods alternating with low periods of quiet contentment. Over recent decades there has been research into many aspects of Boston’s history, done both locally and by people outside the town. Much of this has been published in various places, but this is the first attempt to give a comprehensive account of the town’s history in all its phases.

The town has existed for over nine centuries and through much of that time its life has been linked to places beyond England’s shores. There was probably a river crossing here a thousand years ago, but it was only in the late eleventh century that one of the conquering Norman lords created a new town with a market. Within a century, the town, then called St Botolph’s, was flourishing as the main port exporting wool, which was then England’s main trading product. For many years most of Boston belonged to the Honour of Richmond, which was owned at different times by great nobles of the realm or members of the Royal Family. Then, as now, several languages were to be heard on the streets of Boston and there was occasionally tension and even violence between locals and foreigners. It was said that the final decision by North German traders to stop visiting Boston in the sixteenth century followed the murder of one of their number in the town.

As the medieval wool trade died out and west coast ports rose to greater prominence, Boston entered a period of relative stagnation. It was still the main port of Lincolnshire but no longer was it of importance in national or international trade. Boston’s elite gained more control of the town and its affairs in 1545 when they purchased from the king a charter creating Boston Corporation and endowing it with valuable property and rights. This marked the end of powerful external forces dominating the town, as no longer was the manor owned by a great noble or royal patron, and no longer did the great St Mary’s Abbey of York or the Knights of St John appoint the vicar of St Botolph’s. Now the town was run by local people, and folks in London or York had no direct interest in its affairs.

This reduction in external control at the start of a century or more of religious upheaval allowed Boston to pursue an independent line in its religious life. The moment of reckoning came in the early 1600s when Archbishop Laud started to impose a firmer hand on the Church of England. This led to what is, perhaps, Boston’s greatest contribution to the rest of the world. About 10 per cent of its citizens upped sticks in the 1630s and transplanted Puritan Boston to the other side of the Atlantic, where they soon assumed control of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in New England and imbued the later American conscience with its puritanical ethics. The town they left behind supported Parliament during the Civil War, being on the northern edge of the eastern alliance, and then pursued a quiet course as a local port until the end of the eighteenth century.

Then – suddenly and unexpectedly – Boston became a boom town. London was rapidly expanding to become the largest city in the world, and its people needed feeding. Lincolnshire provided much of the wheat for London’s bread, and ships from Boston carried that crop to the capital. Within eighty years the population of Boston tripled, as people came from far and wide to work in the granaries, shipyards, iron works, breweries and on the ships themselves. Some came in order to meet the needs of the town’s own people for lawyers, doctors, tailors, cobblers, butchers and bakers. The oligarchy running the town feared for the loss of their power, and in the 1830s called in government troops to prevent the revolution they thought was coming. But there was no bang, only a whimper. The boom ended even more quickly than it started when the Great Northern Railway arrived and grabbed the trade from the port.

The GNR became the main employer in the town, but Boston was pushed into another depression until the dock opened in the 1880s, and since then the town has overall had a steady growth as new industries have come and gone. Much of the development in the twentieth century was related to the processing of Lincolnshire’s agricultural produce and its movement by road to the rest of the country.

Richard Gurnham has done a sterling job in bringing together his own research and the work of others in a comprehensive, enjoyable account of the fascinating history of this little town on the eastern shore of Britain. It is the story of its people, from the Norman foundation, through its medieval prosperity, the puritanical assurance which was carried to America, its precarious frontier position during the Civil War, the boom years under George III, and its quieter growth during the twentieth century. Lincolnshire people are not prone to bragging, but there is much to be proud of in Boston’s long history and this book presents it in a readable and enjoyable fashion.

Neil Wright, DMA,

Lincoln, 2014